not knowing, a philosophical dilemma of shared interest to both Adorno and Heidegger.
But surely there is a political circle to square here? While not wishing to suggest that they are the same, much less identical—although each finds his own way to the retreat from politics (Heidegger in the name of “thinking,” Adorno in the name of “negating”)—it is instructive to witness how effortlessly Denis de Rougement aligns Heidegger not only with antifascism but with a Frankfurt School–style repudiation of mass culture. Written while de Rougemont was in exile in the United States, The Devil’s Share is a probing, even desperate study of the status of the diabolical in modern society. In a pugnacious chapter, de Rougement advances a thesis pitched to scold Americans about both their political, moral, and ultimately military failure to recognize the diabolic character of Hitler and, almost paradoxically, their too automatic reduction of Hitler to a largely Judeo-Christian symbol whose cardinal virtue lies in its ability to persuade us that the devil does not exist. Seeking the conditions for this everyday, ordinary damnation, de Rougement turns, in chapter 47, to the theme of “depersonalization” and, surprisingly, radio.
Noting that the devil, in the twentieth century, has lost interest in conscripting individuals and has thus turned its attention to the masses, de Rougement points to the work of Kierkegaard as the first systematic diagnosis of this development. Supplementing Kierkegaard, he points to not only the dialectical fact that “the radio, the press and mass meetings” (Devil’s Share 144) address themselves to masses, leading people to lead lives they do not have, but for him the essential corollary that “masses would not be possible, in the precise sense of a concentration of men, without the radio, loudspeakers, the press and rapid transportation” (145), insisting upon the perverse, onto-technological dimension of depersonalization. Radio produces the reception that scans for it, a reception just as bad as the designs of the device. It is when de Rougement teases out the distinctly diabolical character of the contemporary situation that the Heideggerian themes, doubtless cued by the references to Kierkegaard, enter the mix. In quick succession, under the titular heading of “The Tower of Babel” (an allusion later taken over by Erik Barnouw for his volume on early radio), de Rougement appeals to formulations such as the “frames have grown too big,” we “clamor for bigness,” things are “too large for our capacities,” we have “moved too fast,” and perhaps most tellingly of all, “society has become too gigantic to be taken in at a single glance.” Given these characterizations of mass-mediated depersonalization coupled with the syntagmatic fact that this list segues to a discussion of boredom (one of the recurrent preoccupations of both Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), one is hard-pressed to deny that Heidegger, and specifically Heidegger’s discussion of radio, haunts this analysis. De Rougement is virtually repeating, but now in the context of mobilizing the confrontation with fascism, Heidegger’s anxious discussion of de-severance. While today (and to some extent already in the thirties) we recognize that the so-called romantic anticapitalist critique of fascism was compromised, the all too readily at hand—because tendentious—opposition of Adorno and Heidegger’s politics around the implications of mass culture is hard to sustain. Moreover, the obsession with alignment is the surest means by which to subject politics to what Agamben called “the aporias of sovereignty” (Homo Sacer 48). This said, the fraught and contentious proximity between Adorno and Heidegger is perhaps not as interesting as the fact that radio brings it out. Indeed, radio as something like a metonymy of mass culture appears precisely as the locus for a certain form of philosophical crisis, as though the political meaning of philosophy’s position were directly transmitted by or otherwise channeled through it.5
By way of bringing the discussion to a provisional rest, I will dwell for a bit longer on Lang’s underdeveloped, yet politically charged concept, that of silence. In solidarity with Margaret Attwood’s laconic assertion that “context is all,” indulge me as I repeat an oft-repeated anecdote, firm in the belief that the context generated by these remarks will realize the formalist goal of estranging the familiar. As John Cage himself tells it in a 1955 essay, the story goes like this:
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to hear. In fact, try to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of a special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high, one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. (“Experimental Music” 8)
The immediate aim of this anecdote is, on the one hand, to defeat the neo-Romantic notion that music emerges from, and thus gives transcendental order to, the Pascalian universe of silent, infinite space and, on the other hand, to assure readers that music, once retheorized, has a future. For me, however, what is striking is the way Cage re-poses the question of listening and the range of hearing. In effect, the two sounds he identifies, radiating as they do from the living body, from what Agamben would have to call the sheer animal capacity for voice, point to the haunted wheezing, the hear-stripe, that conditions all hearing we are prepared to recognize as such. The point here is not to resurrect the bio-anatomical body but to recognize that hearing is, to use a Lacanianism, mediated by listening, that is, by the signifier, or, as I prefer, by disciplinary reason. In this sense, Cage can be read as proposing that we produce silence as the form of the not-hearing that our listening rests upon in order to identify its objects of acoustic attention. Or, to translate the point back into the terms of this discussion, Cage finds in the absence of silence a sound calling for attention, not in and of itself as some ethereal avatar of the musica universalis, but as an index of what the contemporary, disciplinary organization of listening receives badly, if at all.
Formulating the point in these terms directs us immediately back to Being and Time, not to its meditation on de-severance, but to its analysis of the call, der Ruf.6 This material appears in Heidegger’s effort to grasp “conscience,” specifically “the voice of conscience,” not as a psychological experience but as an ontological structure. The formulation inviting the comparison between Cage and Heidegger reads as follows: “The call does not report events; it calls without uttering anything. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. And it does this only because, in calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it does not call him into the public idle talk of the ‘they’ [des Man], but calls him back from this into the reticence [Verschweigenheit] of his existent potentiality-for-Being. When the caller reaches him to whom the appeal is made, it does so with a cold assurance which is uncanny, but by no means obvious” (Being 322). To be blunt, I do not find the matter of conscience, per se, what is most interesting about this material. More interesting is the way Heidegger anticipates Cage’s complication of silence by discovering in the call a sound that does not utter anything. Sensing that enunciating such a call complicates the entire motif of the “voice of conscience,” Heidegger insists not only that the caller of the call is the neutral “it” (“Es” ruft) but that, to the extent that it speaks at all, it does so with an “alien voice” (eine fremde Stimme). Obviously, one finds here—in the no one who is the speaker, in the uncanny, in the odd fascination with des Man—elements that vividly recall Adorno’s discussion of the “Radio Voice,” but before these are elaborated, note that just as the voice of conscience is a sound but not a voice, so too is the reception of the sound a listening that is not a hearing. Indeed, Heidegger is careful both here and in “Logos” (his reading of Heraclitus from 1954) to insist upon the need for philosophy to think the ontology of hearing differently, specifically with an ear pricked toward the philosophical limits of the thinking of hearing.
The point is simply this: in both Cage and Heidegger the silence that is not one produces both a practical possibility and a theoretical provocation. Specifically, what is called for—and I use the expression advisedly—is an approach to sound that situates it in the “neutral zone,” the zone of indistinction, between a musicology straining to capture noise as something
